Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. — 329 p. — ISBN: 0805815058
Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of lexicology/lexicography. The chapters in this volume address the status of idioms in recent formal and experimental linguistic theory.
Chomsky (1981) argued that the study of language is concerned with the discovery of the framework of principles and elements common to attainable human languages, that is, universal grammar. Universal grammar specifies a set of core grammars. What is represented in the mind of an individual would be a core grammar with a periphery of marked elements and constructions. In such a view, idioms clearly belong to the periphery and not to the core of the language system. However, that does not mean that idioms are a peripheral phenomenon, as the work presented in this volume makes clear. Through the study of idioms, we can learn more about the core.
An important development marks the last few decades of idiom research. Whereas originally idioms were the focus of only a small part of the research of a few individuals whose concern it was whether idioms could be dealt with in a more general framework, model, or theory, they now represent an important research theme for a significant group of researchers. This may be due to the fact that linguists have come to realize that idioms and idiomlike constructions make up a large part of our knowledge of language and are a persistent feature of language. In his contribution to this volume (chapter 8) Mel’éuk even claims that people do not speak in words, they speak in phrasemes. The time when kick the bucket was not only the prototypical idiom but indeed the only idiom in linguistics is behind us.
Why a collection of studies on idioms? There is a straightforward reason. If we study idioms we have to address the concept of a lexical component in a grammatical framework. The generative research tradition was influenced in the past by the Bloomfieldian view of the lexicon as an appendix to the grammar, a list of basic irregularities. As a consequence very little attention was paid to the lexicon or to issues related to the lexicon (such as morphology). Since the late 1970s and early 1980s this has changed. The lexicon has become more important in several theoretical linguistic frameworks, and across several linguistic disciplines (cf. Boguraev and Briscoe (1989); Levin (1993); Pustejovsky (1993)). In theoretical frameworks like Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan (1982)), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag (1987)), Catégorial Grammar (Oehrle, Bach, & Wheeler (1988))—to name a few—lexical information has become a central issue of debate. In Government-Binding (GB) theory considerable attention has been paid to the lexicon since the introduction of the Projection Principle in Chomsky (1981).
